Sometimes you find a bizarre piece of silver. In this case, it's a silver banknote from the New Zealand Mint. They call it a "coin note". This "coin note" is the weirdest piece of silver in my collection. I never thought I'd utter the words note and silver in the same sentence. But here we go, it's a Star Wars themed bank note made of fine silver foil. Five grams of fine silver to be exact and as thin as a human hair.
Obverse
(Do you call the front of banknotes obverse too?)The obverse shows a colourised Darth Vader on the left with his lightsaber. The right shows the iconic scene from "Episode IV: A New Hope" where Vader arrests Princess Leia on board of her ship.
Aside from this, you can also find a serial number in the bottom right corner.
Reverse
On the reverse, everything is as usual. We can find a denomination of 1 New Zealand Dollar and Queen Elizabeth II. in the center. In the top right corner is the fineness and weight of the note. It's the size of a large banknote 150x70mm (5.9x2.7 inches) and feels a lot heavier than normal paper banknotes. It reached a mintage, or should I say "printage" of 50,000 notes. It's not minted through pressure but rather printed on top of the silver foil.
Conclusion
At first, I wasn't even sure if I received real silver, because it's laminated in plastic. I'm still not 100% certain, but if you zoom closer, you can see a metallic surface. This, plus that it's listed on the homepage of the mint convinces me at least partially that it's silver. It's still the weirdest piece of silver which I've seen to this date. Honestly, who got the idea to make silver banknotes in the first place. Have you heard of those oddities before? There seems to be a whole bunch of them, featuring scenes from Disney movies, Star Wars and Star Trek.
Elly is still very confused about this "thing". It feels like plastic, it's heavy but it's supposed to be silver. Poor Elly...